AEROWORKS is organizing a Special Session on "Towards the realization of the Aerial Robotic Workers" at IROS 2016.

Aim and Scope

Infrastructure is the foundation that connects our resources, energy flows, business, communities and people, driving our economy and improving our quality of life. For the global economies in order to retain and strengthen their competitiveness, a new class of advanced tools and methods is required. This special session focuses on this need and aims to provide aerial robotic infrastructure inspection and maintenance solutions as a next­generation methodology and tool to improve infrastructure services.

More specifically, the aim of this innovative special session is to contribute to the discussions on the state of the art and the future trends towards the concept of “Collaborative Aerial Robotic Workers” that envisions a team of collaborative aerial systems equipped with advanced environmental perception and 3D reconstruction, active aerial manipulation, intelligent task planning, and multi­agent collaboration capabilities. Such a team of Aerial Robotic Workers will be capable of autonomously inspecting infrastructure facilities and acting in order to execute a maintenance task by means of aerial manipulation and exploiting multi­robot collaboration.

The proposal of this special session is aiming in highlighting the early state of the art scientific contributions from the Horizon 2020 AEROWORKS project, which is leading the aerial robotic developments in Europe, while integrating significant contributions from other scientific teams working in the same area and other collaborative projects, while exchanging success stories and enabling an international collaboration under this thematic umbrella.

List of main topics

This special session aims at attracting state of the art articles in order to investigate the underlined emerging scientific challenges of decentralized multi­robot collaboration, path­ planning, control for aerial collaborative manipulation, aerial manipulator design, autonomous localization, as well as, cooperative environmental perception and reconstruction.